Camp Diary of a Shy Girl to a Confident Young Woman: Part 5

At fifteen, I wasn’t sure about what I wanted in life. In the last exam, I had managed to score a C. that was the best I could produce. I was comfortable. Besides, I wasn’t the last one in the class and I was smart. I had managed to score 334 marks out of 500 in the Kenya Certificate for Primary Education (KCPE). Most of the people I was in high school with hadn’t achieved that much. I was part of the ‘elite’, or so I thought.

I joined camp a little bullied girl. I was bullied for all reasons varying from my weight, or my stand at refusing to join the Christian Union when everyone was a fanatic and was being attacked by ‘evil spirits’ in school. At some point, I was even branded as a follower of the ‘illuminati’ or whatever that was. Being in a catholic school, this was a very serious issue. It didn’t matter whether it was a stupid rumour. Whatever was being whispered in regards to this following was the truth. My classmates would threaten me by saying they would report me to the principal. That would have been the end of my high-school life. I would remember how my mum worked hard to provide for me and my siblings. How she would cross Kenyatta highway with two small buckets of water to water the plants to sell, how at some instances, she was almost hit by cars and the drivers would haul insults at her for being careless while crossing the road and I would feel so low. I tolerated how they treated me because I didn’t want to see my mother’s efforts go to waste. Besides, we had been through enough with my mum through primary school. I remember how she would wake up at four in the morning, prepare and take me to school. When it rained, she would walk through stagnant water with me on her back since we lived in a swampy area. We would get to town at around five thirty and she would go to her garden then, to water her plants. The thought of these tough times made me not wish to bother her with what I was going through in school.

I started the mentoring camps a beaten girl. Broken. I would share my story with my sisters during the evening sessions. No matter how small it seemed then, sharing eased the pain a little bit. The support system was amazing. We would spend the whole night encouraging each other to be strong and to remember what kept us going for so long.

During one of the sessions, I shared my grades. The facilitator looked at me then and told me I could do better. She even promised a prize to anyone who improved their grades. She later on asked me what I wanted to do with my life and I told her I wanted to be a doctor. She looked at me straight in the eye and told me that I wouldn’t be one if I continued scoring those poor grades. She later asked me what motivated me and what set my soul on fire when doing things. I told her my mum’s story and how I wanted to get her out of that job. She told me to always think of her whenever I felt like giving up.

I didn’t become a doctor but I am very happy where I am now and am glad to say that Resource Center gave birth to the person I am now. I came to realize afterwards that I didn’t want to be a doctor after all. I wanted to pursue social work and do amazing things and change people’s lives like how RCWG did to mine.

For that, I am truly grateful.

Article by 

Esther Wambui

Mentoring and Empowerment Camps Alumni

Group of 2015

Camp Diary of a Shy Girl to a Confident Young Woman: Part 4

All that she had learnt back then didn’t make a lot of sense. It was all about having fun and enjoying the travel, meeting her sisters once again and well, the change of environment was good for a disturbed soul like hers. That was her definition of camp, a rose garden where she could walk around and feel amazing, be free to speak her mind and no one would reproach her for it, feel protected, feel safe.

Looking back to those days, she sees the sense in what they were taught. She remembered imagining how freedom would feel like. The facilitators always insisted that freedom came with responsibility. She had always wondered what it meant until she got to campus and everything changed. Her mother was not with her to tell her to do things. Asking for permission to go anywhere was now foreign. She could eat whatever she wanted, wear what she wanted without seeking approval and she was a government sponsored student who had been awarded the Higher Education Loan. Part of it was spent to pay the school fees and the rest well, it stayed in her account which she had easy access to and wouldn’t have to ask for anyone’s approval to spend it. Nobody was controlling her anymore. FREEDOM!!

It felt so good. She could now meet the ‘’love of her life” without fear and could stay out for as long as she wanted. She didn’t know how wrong her perception of freedom was. She remembers how she would sneak out of school and travel to see him with her little allowance that she would receive from her struggling parents every month. She had forgotten where she had come from and the effort she had had to put to get to where she was at that moment. She would feel so proud telling people how she had passed her exams and was in an institution of her higher learning and yet she didn’t have a clear picture of how lost she was at that time. Pride had clouded her judgement. Besides, if she made it to the university, she could as well pass her exams without much effort. She stopped going to class. She had a room in the hostels but barely slept there. She made ‘appearances’ to school and was thrilled about it. The transformation was drastic. Whenever her friends or family asked why she was behaving that way, she would say that she was an adult in the eyes of the government and was free to do whatever she pleased. She had never protected anyone as much as she had protected her love. He was the only person in her life who loved her. She locked her friends and family out of her life. She didn’t need them.

She missed out on so much. She never got to socialize with new people in school but she was happy and didn’t care what people thought about her. Before her main exams, she was invited back for a Mentoring camp. She felt so nice filling out the evaluation forms on sex since she thought she knew everything. No one was as bright as her when it came to that topic. They were asked to make a SWOT. The facilitator had explained that a SWOT is an analysis that identifies the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats one had towards achieving a particular goal. The first goal she identified was finishing her university studies with a first class honours. As a challenge, she identified freedom as one of them.

When they went through their SWOT’s, reality started to dawn on her. Wow, people had dreams. She had dreams that she had completely forgotten about.

Her turn came to make a presentation of her SWOT and she felt embarrassed. She wished she could erase freedom as a challenge from the flip chart but it was too late. She had to explain what she meant and she did. The response she got from the facilitator made her mind switch from her entitled state to reality. The facilitator reminded her of her journey from high school and how she had struggled to achieve her grades. The hard work that her mother did to provide for her in order to raise her school fees. She cried. She was ashamed. The facilitator asked her to see her aside. The talk they had changed her.

Article by 

Esther Wambui

Mentoring and Empowerment Camps Alumni

Group of 2015

Camp Diary of a Shy Girl to a Confident Young Woman: Part 3

The facilitator asked them how the exercise was. She smiled and looked at the rest of her sisters. Her hands were under the table fingers crossed praying that the facilitator won’t pick her to answer the question.  Everyone in the room was looking in another direction. Nobody volunteered to answer. Besides, they all thought the exercise was personal and what they had ‘seen’ would remain between them and the mirror. The facilitator picked the girl seated next to her. She felt so relieved that her crossed fingers had done the magic. When asked for her feedback, she kept quiet and smiled. The smile of embarrassment.

The facilitator told them that she was not going to let them off that easy and that they had to repeat the exercise in the evening. She asked them why they were embarrassed to look at their own bodies.

That had a pretty obvious answer, it is simply not good. It is not allowed. It was an unspoken sin to look at the vagina. The perception the society had instilled in them is that when you look at the vagina you will be tempted to touch it and if you did, you will be committing a sin against yourself and God. It was also the most unclean part of their bodies and you really didn’t want to see where blood passed through every month!! Plus only ‘bad’ girls would dare look at the vagina and she wasn’t ready to be one of them. She had seen instances where some girls had gotten pregnant and wondered if they had touched their own vaginas in addition to having sex. The way they were treated made her even shyer to look at hers. Their friends would be warned by their parents not to associate with the ‘bad girls’ because they would also get their ‘bad habits’ and would begin to sleep around and finally get pregnant. They were highly alienated and whenever parents wanted to teach or pass a message to their daughters, they would quote them and say, “continue talking to boys and you will end up like that girl who got pregnant” or “that is what happens when you don’t listen to us.”

She never wanted to be the example the community would use when advising their children so most of the times she would stay indoors and only get out when she was sent to the shop. She never wanted to talk to boys, first because of what people would think about her and second because if her parents were told, that would have been the cause of world war three. She learnt that good girls are often silent, don’t ask questions and did whatever they were told no matter how unfair they thought it was.

The facilitator told them to embrace their bodies and they shouldn’t let a book or anyone else to tell them how their vaginas looked like and yet they had it and could look at it. The final statement was given. The facilitator would not teach the sexual and reproductive health rights session until they re-did the exercise.

What the facilitator told them still rings in her head. Society gives a lot of rules on how women should behave and how they should treat their bodies and yet the body belongs to us! She remembers how when she did that exercise, the fear that she had whether people would somehow read her thoughts and know that she did it… she actually looked at her Vagina!! It wasn’t hard. She waited for something to happen but nothing came. No punishment from God and she discovered that no one would know unless she told them. She usually had the common belief that she would somehow feel guilty and ashamed for looking let alone touching but she felt nothing. Did society lie? Was everything they said about her sexuality a lie? Was it trying to programme girls to do what it thought was right or manipulate them according to its beliefs?

Article by 

Esther Wambui

Mentoring and Empowerment Camps Alumni

Group of 2015